Conversion Rate Question: Should I Measure Visits or Unique Visits?
-
When you measure conversion rates, is the equation:
- conversion rate = visits/conversions
or
- conversion rate = unique visits/conversions
I ask because it can actually make a pretty big difference in the conversion rate. For example, if you visit my ecommerce website 100 times before buying something (and assuming you're my only visitor), then my conversion rate is 100% _if I'm determining conversion rates by unique visits/conversions. _However, it's only 1% _if I'm determining conversion rates by visits/conversions. _Wow!
Now this is clearly an extreme example, but it should serve to illustrate the point that in more reasonable cases, the way the data is measured can have a potentially significant impact on the conversion rate.
Is there an industry standard for this?
Am I missing something really basic?
Also, here's a little bit of context for the question:
I run an ecommerce website powered by the Magento CMS and I'm trying to measure my conversion rate in Google Analytics for individual products. Google Analytics shows me my site wide conversion rate, but apparently I have to do some customization in order to measure conversion rates on the product level. That's fine, but I want to make sure I'm measuring my product conversions in a standard way.
Thanks for any and all help!
Adam
-
Conversion rate = Conversions / Visitors (you had it flipped around)
Choosing whether to track unique or not depends on the buying cycle - some items (think high cost, high research) are never converted on a unique visit so by tracking unique visitors, your conversion rate is 0%.
The best solution is to track conversion per recurring visitor (e.g. conversions / unique, conv / 1st return, conv / 2nd return, etc). This will give you a better example of how many visits per conversion on average it takes for someone to convert and you can try to improve the rate at each stage.
-
conversion rate = **unique **visits/conversions is the recommended equation but there are other factors to consider in your equation to obtain the true conversion rate.
Not every visitor can be considered a conversion opportunity. Here is a good article on Kaushik.net to help you calculate a true conversion rate for your website.
-
Personally, I think unique visits are more relevant then visits. If you go back to the example I used in my original question, if 1 person visits my site 100 times before making their purchase, it makes sense to me that my conversion rate is measured as 100%, and it doesn't make sense that the conversion rate was 1%. Now that's my opinion, however I don't want to measure my conversion rates that way if the industry measures it a completely different way.
Though after I re-read your response I'm beginning to think that you're saying something very similar to Kevin Budzynski, which is that you can measure two different things if you look at visits and unique visits. That's a good point. I'll have to think about this more - but I suppose my other question continues to stand, which is, is there an industry standard?
-
We are planning to measure both for pretty much that reason. Yet, that doesn't tell me which (if either) is an industry standard in ecommerce. Understanding the industry standard is important if I want to understand how my conversion rates stack up against other merchants in the industry.
-
I think it depends on whether you look more closely at visits or unique visits as a definition of traffic. It also depends on what you are trying to determine like how many visits it takes to drive a conversion or how many individual people convert on average.
-
Measure both. By doing so, you will be able to see trends you may not see by doing one or the other.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What's Causing My Extremely Low Bounce Rate
My client's site that is reporting an under 10% bounce rate for all sources. Direct is the highest at 8%. I'm no expert in GA but wondering if there is a problem with the analytics/tag manager code on the site. I'm especially concerned about the GTM body script being in an iframe which I read could be trouble. <!-- Google Tag Manager (noscript) -->
Reporting & Analytics | | bradsimonis
<noscript><iframe src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/ns.html?id=GTM-MWGMNW6"
height="0" width="0" style="display:none;visibility:hidden"></iframe></noscript>
<!-- End Google Tag Manager (noscript) --> You can see all the source code here:
view-source:https://nfinit.com/0 -
Will adjusted bounce rate affect avg time on page?
I recently read Rob Beirne's piece on how and why to set up an adjusted bounce rate in Google Analytics (https://mza.seotoolninja.com/blog/adjusted-bounce-rate). I am getting myself ready to talk to our site team about why we should set up an adjusted bounce rate and am anticipating some questions I'd like to be able to answer: 1. Will an adjusted bounce rate improve the accuracy of our avg time on page metrics? 2. Are we able to keep the unadjusted bounce rate in GA as well, so we can compare the two metrics if we ever need to? Does anyone know the answers to these questions? Any help would be much appreciated!
Reporting & Analytics | | seoisfun0 -
Organic reports showing a URL that isn't in Search Ask Question
In the image I've attached you can see that I have pulled a source/medium > google organic report. I've also made "landing page" my secondary dimension. The first landing page that is showing up is /v3/?slug=fnl, that is this page (https://orders.freshnlean.com/v3/?slug=fnl). You can see that the page has 230 sessions from Sep 3 - 9 and 17 transactions during that same time frame. The only thing is, that landing page is nowhere to be found in the SERPs. So how is it showing up in this report as having received google organic visitors that converted if it's not even in search? 05OclDp
Reporting & Analytics | | tdastru0 -
Less than 7% bounce rate
I've just taken on a new client and on first look at their Google Analytics they are getting a bounce rate between 7% and 0%. Frankly I'm amazed if this is correct as between 1 April 2017 and 21 June 2017 they've driven 6403 session to the site from a range of referrers as well as AdWords (which has a 0% bounce rate), so traffic is pretty good. I've never seen such a low bounce rate which is making me suspicious, what can I do to check it's all recording properly? Any other ideas or have I found a near perfect site in terms of bounce? The url is http://knuma.co.uk/
Reporting & Analytics | | Marketing_Optimist1 -
Bounce Rate: what is it EXACTLY?
Hi everyone: we all know the term 'Bounce Rate'. I'd like to think i have a good idea of what BR is....but some things are not really clear to me. Time to call in the experts. Question #1: What EXACTLY will stop Google from considering the visit as a bounce? As discussed not too long ago in this topic https://mza.seotoolninja.com/community/q/will-this-fix-my-bounce-rate
Reporting & Analytics | | BasKierkels
Ruben wrote: "..what it basically means is that someone clicks on your SERP, and then clicks back to google? But, it doesn't matter if they spent 10 minutes on your page or 10 seconds" Jessica Conflitti wrote a reply in which she basically said that it might be a good idea to have visitors click to a different page OR a PDF-file. That's where my confusion has been for some time now: Clicking on a PDF-document, an image in the page that opens with Fancybox, a link to a different domain? Or can it only be a different URL on the same domain? The way i would expect it to be:
Pages contain the GA-tracking code. So am i right by thinking that Google needs to have the same GA-tracking code to be loaded twice? Because only at that point will they have two datapoints. And only then will they be able to tell that the visitor hasn't left. By clicking a PDF-document - as described by Jessica - you wouldn't load the GA-code twice. So I would expect that clicking a PDF does not make a difference for the BR. Don't get me wrong: i like the article but it is this detail that throws me off. IF Google can read or capture these clicks, what other elements can be used to reduce bounce rate? Clicking on a YouTube-video embedded in the page? I'm asking this because i want to get this right. Question #2: how much weight does BR have on Time on Page, Engagement, etc? We know Google is taking a lot of things into consideration when calculating the value of a URL or domain. So how much should we care for BR if we know the Time on Page is good and a large percentage of people are frequently returning? How about your experiences or knowledge on that? Really looking forward to your replies and help on clearing this topic for me. And perhaps some other readers as well! Bas0 -
Tracking Organic Traffic and Conversions from multiple TLDs with Google Tag Manager
Hello Guys, I want to track traffic / conversions from different domains (basically same brand - but a lot of different TLD's). The "problem" is that the main conversion which I want to track always happens on the .com TLD and all other TLD's link to there. The problem is, that now the traffic always counts as Referral Traffic, even after setting up cross domain tracking over the google tag manager... So example: Sessions begins on example.co.uk/landing-page11 after User searched on it on google. He decides to buy the product and therefore moves to example.com for the checkout process. No I will have the conversion in my google analytics under referral with example.co.uk. --> but I want to have it under organic, and not under referral. How I can manage this? Thanks for you Help!
Reporting & Analytics | | _Heiko_0 -
Differences in organic search visits and non-paid keyword visits
Hi folks, I was just wondering at the disparity between the "Organic Search Visits" total in the Traffic Data tab and the total visits from "Non Paid Keywords Sending Search Visits". Once you add up all the traffic generated from the individual keywords (including the not provided numbers) shouldn't the total match the number of organic search results? Or is there something I'm missing? At the moment the total visits from non-paid keywords is about 2,000 short of the total organic search visits.
Reporting & Analytics | | BrettCollins0 -
Increase in 'Googlebot-Image' visits in analytics
Hi, I noticed a substantial increase in 'Googlebot-Image' visits data under Technology>Browser & OS in Google analytics for a few clients. Is this a bug? Are there any known fixes apart from just adding a filter to exclude the data? Regards Niladri
Reporting & Analytics | | neildomain0